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Comments:     Originally-From: Alex Stark <jas1@eng.cam.ac.uk>
Date:         Sat, 29 Jan 1994 12:13:18 -0600
From: Rainer Schoepf <schoepf@SC>
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Subject:      Re: Rejected posting to LATEX-L@DHDURZ1
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Message resent for Alex Stark.....

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 94 11:48:12 CST
From: Alex Stark <jas1@eng.cam.ac.uk>
Sender: jas1@eng.cam.ac.uk
Message-Id: <42493.jas1@mail-serv.eng.cam.ac.uk>
To: LATEX-L@DHDURZ1
Subject: Re: dangers of redefining commands

There is a problem with redefining the basic commands that indicate the
structure and delineate mathematics. I think that it is important.

1) We had an amusing incident recently when someone spell-checked a
document. They had redefined \begin{eqnarray} as \beq, purely out of
laziness. The spell checker would normally skip over the math but in this
case could not identify it.

2) Editors are often clever enough to identify structure. I use emacs in
auc-tex mode. This is a folding editor, showing only section headings until
you open them up. It's really useful even on modestly-sized documents. It
would be possible, though irritating to redefine the heading patterns in
auc-tex for each set of LaTeX definitions. However, emacs is exceptionally
flexible.


Maths is a problem more generally. For example, the aforementioned spell
checker skipped the rest of the document on finding \\[-1ex]! Further, it
would not recognize \begin{gather} of ams-Latex.

Could we distinguish environments that spelling and grammar checkers should
skip? Perhaps \beginmath{} as well as \begin{}? What would be done about
$...$ and \[...\]?

Alex Stark.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Alex Stark          Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory
                                             Department of Engineering
email: jas1@uk.ac.cam.eng                      University of Cambridge
Tel:   [+44]223 3 32767                             Trumpington Street
Fax:   [+44]223 3 32662                         Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, UK